Children were exposed to aggressive or non-aggressive adult models when playing. They also experimented with same and opposite sex models to see if that had any effect.
The results of the experiment were:
1. Children exposed to the violent model tended to imitate the exact behaviour they had observed when the adult was no longer present.
2. While children of both genders in the non-aggressive group did exhibit less aggression than the control group. The boys who had observed an opposite sex model behave non-aggresively were more likely than those in the control group to engage in violence.
3. Boys who observed adult males behaving violently were more influenced than those who had observed a female model behaving aggressively. Interestingly, the experimenters found that in the same sex aggressive groups, boys were more likely to imitate physical acts o violence while girls were more likely to imitate verbal aggression.
4. Boys engaged in more than twice as many aggressive acts than the girls.
The results o fthe bobo doll experiment supported Bandura's social learning theory. Bandura and his colleagues believed that the experiment demonstrates how specific behaviours can be learned through observation and imitation. The authors also suggested that "social imitation may hasten or short cut the acquisition of new behaviours without the necessity of reinforcing successive approximation as suggested by Skinner.
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